While the Moon is accessible to us with current technology… the rest of the solar system… including Mars… will require breakthrough technology to colonize in a reasonable time frame. The technology now exists to expand humanity even beyond Mars… to the hundreds of other worlds throughout the solar system.
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Special thanks to Professor Slough and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and Fragomatik, the amazingly talented and generous artist who created the animation for the HOPE mission technology and the Fusion Driven Rocket concept.
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Video Credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6gdTX3TsZI
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Just realized this is the same Jupiter project that a guy called Nessus on YT made a RSS KSP video on
Really cool stuff
"While the Moon is accessible to us with current technology"
No it isn't.
Untried and unbuilt systems does not equal current technology.
Five years in space on the Calisto run. It's insane.
At the 9 min mark the ship is seen in full profile. What I observe is what seems to be a very long hallway from one end of the ship to the other. Is this as narrow as it looks, or is it fairly big around allowing for say larger crew quarters, observation areas and rooms for almost everything else. In other words what is the diameter of the long end to end tube and what are its uses.
There is the question of whether it will be deemed safe to fire a direct nuclear drive in LEO like what is proposed here. It may pass muster because the exhaust is so light it is likely to stay in the upper atmosphere and not cause too many problems on the surface or even with planes flying at altitude. A bigger question may be the EMP pulses interfering with other spacecraft in orbit. I am thinking while NTP is a less efficient direct nuclear drive tech than what is talked about here, the emissions will be considered safe enough for LEO use with confidence. A big part of any mission starting from Earth is how to go from LEO to escape velocity. (From the surface to LEO, Starship should be a big step up and Starship orbital refueling tech could be adapted to the escape velocity burn with a low efficiency.) A concept I have is the NTP booster to push a crewed ship up to escape velocity from LEO and then come back and use atmospheric skimming on possibly multiple passes to help it get back into LEO without the need for heat shielding. This way the main direct nuclear propulsed ship can use whatever 'dirty' direct nuclear drive tech you want to run at high efficiencies while generating plenty of thrust to get somewhere in the solar system quickly while firing up the drive a safe distance from Earth.
The NTP booster may actually have a fairly large nuclear reactor for its size because while you don't want to have too big of an ending mass and so you don't want the reactor to be too big and heavy, there is a balance point where you gain a lot of savings from the Oberth Effect both for getting up to speed near Earth and so you don't want a slow burn that is still happening far from Earth and also for getting the booster back, the sooner the booster detaches and does its capture burn, the less of a delta-V burn that will have to be. While I don't know where exactly this balance point is, especially as I don't know the power density of NTP engines, I am guesstimating that it is around a burn time of 1 hour. This is basically saying the NTP engine is probably pretty heavy for the rate it goes through propellant and the effectiveness of the Oberth Effect is not too diminished over the average distance from Earth over a 1 hour escape velocity burn starting from LEO. If you go for say a 30 minute burn, the NTP engine would be much bigger and heavier and the loss of effectiveness of the Oberth Effect may not be worth it. A 2 hour burn may reduce the size of the NTP engine, but the reduction in engine mass may be more than offset by doing a lot of the burn far from Earth where the Oberth Effect is much less. As mentioned before I am just guesstimating here, but I don't think the final answer will wander too far from here.
Could you please go over vasmir engines
What if…. we get a Moon base and or Mars base established, couldn't we build the nuclear reactors there with locally mined material and only send the extremely complex mechanisms from earth? Most of what goes into a nuclear powerplant is shielding, pipes and fuel materials.
The extremely complex control systems and computers could be built on earth and the fuel, Metals, Pipes ect. could be manufactured on the moon, Mars or orbital station completely solving the problem of getting regulatory approvals for manufacturing, and flying on a rocket to space. Not a chance of getting approved to send nuke material to space but what if we make it there? not a lot of regulators standing around on the Moon or Mars lol. Not only that, most of which are for environmental impact which, Mars and the Moon are already irradiated wastelands.
Commodore Joseph, your presentations are truly works of art and so incredibly instructive. Am so glad I can lend what little I have to contribute for support. John Slough, as you know, is also the inventor of the Plasma Magnetic sail and is also heavily involved in developing Magnetoshell Aerocapture…still working phase II NIAC grant. Both of these technologies could be used in conjunction with the missions you just covered. Kevin
Great work, guys!
A wonderful summary of the nuclear propulsion options & the HOPE missions.
Thanks for the shout-out! 👍👍🚀
End of October, I predicted the sub-orbital flight would have happened by the 12 of January or within 2 weeks after that day… My prognosis was in error = my sense of the present moment needs to be refined… but who can really hold all the pertinent data required to deduce a conclusion of curent events three months out, with more than 80% accuracy?
Seems such discernment would require Super Sapience or at least Superior Sentience being guided by generic Sapience(which is quite low~shallow).
I do really like this idea, but there is something about the nuclear salt water rocket, proposed by Robert Zubrin that has always fascinated me for missions of this distance.
Perhaps it is the simplicity of the idea, or the fuel efficiency that can be achieved.
but no, I suspect it is the idea of riding a constantly exploding fission bomb to the outer solar system.
This would be a problem to develop, test, produce, and certainly launch from earth, but from the moon or mars?
I would love to hear opinions on this.
By the way, Scott Manley has a good video on the nuclear salt water rocket that is well worth checking out.